ZOOLOGICAL NAMES AS OBJECT OF LINGUISTIC RESEARCH

Abstract

The history of animal names begins with the early epochs of human evolution, when animalism was one of the basic components of the worldview. Despite a considerable number of works that study zoological vocabulary, the uncertainty of a number of terms and a certain arbitrariness of the use of terms and concepts associated with animal names is still present in onomastics, e.g. "zoonym" and "zoomorphism" refer to such concepts. The purpose of the article is to clarify the terminological meaning of these concepts, to generalize and systematize the basic research on the theory of zoonymic nominations. The research methodology was formed on the basis of theoretical positions in the field of onomastics and the theory of nominations in modern linguistics. As a result of the theoretical analysis the following findings were made. First, the terms "zoonym" and "zoomorphism" are not synonymous. "Zoonym" is a more general term than "zoomorphism". Zoomorphism represents zoological names of anthropological nature, attributing the traits associated with the image of an animal to a human. Zoonyms do not have such attributes. "Zoonim" is proposed to be the general term. Another finding was that the functioning of zoonyms and zoomorphisms in the literary text is influenced by the genre of the text, which is expressed in the genre determinism of the lexical composition of zoonyms nominating animals.